Geeks.com were once more very kind to send us one of their products for a review. Geeks sells cheap laptops --among others-- and so we asked for a low-cost laptop without an operating system in it for the purpose of this review. They sent us the IBM T23, (currently selling for just $299) and an extra 256 MB stick of RAM ($30). We tested the laptop with three different OSes, read on for more.

"I use them quite often:
Win+D to show the desktop (iconifying all the windows)
Win+L to lock your PC
And more rarely:
Win+R to run a command "

You're marking yourself as a quite professional "Windows" user because you know this. The L and D combination weren't even known to me. Tje average user uses the mouse more than the keyboard, and he usually avoids these keys.

"Too bad, Linux distribs, by default, doesn't use the same shortcut keys.."

Just have a look at the configuration dialog of your favourite desktop environment (KDE or Gnome) or the window manager of your choice, you can surely configure it this way. This should not be very hard to do. But I don't think KDE's or Gnome's developers will implement these functions by default.

At work, I use an Apple USB keyboard and have set some useful functions (using xmodmap and the XFCE configuration), at home I use a Sun USB keyboard where the many extra keys (just have a look at its layout in xkeycaps: Sun Microsystems Type 5), along with Compose and Meta. "Windows" users surely don't know what these are used for, so they usually call them useless. In my opinion, the "Windows" keys are useless because they don't to something by default or in general, they just consume the rare space on the keyboard (space bar), which is often a problem on small laptop keyboards if you feel more comfortable with a real keyboard. :-)